Page 39 of The Scot Beds His Wife

God, he was strong. And fast.

She’d be afraid if she wasn’t so aroused.

Goddammit.

“Have ye lost yer bloodymind,lass?” he hissed, his thunderous expression, along with the fingers digging into her upper arm, warned her that he was seconds away from shaking her senseless.

His was a relevant question, Samantha had to admit, though not in the context he’d meant it.

She had to be certifiably insane to have kissed him back.

Damn,but he was the devil. Temptation personified. The theoretical favored son of whichever God crafted such physical perfection. And, like the so-called star of the morning, he infamously used his powers for wicked,wickedends.

He made the wrong choice feel so utterly right. In his arms, an immoral sin became heavenly bliss. But at what cost?

Her body? Her soul?

Samantha berated herself with a bleak and stolid self-loathing that reached into the very core of her being. Sheshouldhave shothim.Put him out of her misery. Her favored Colt had protected her from more than a few drunken cowboys who’d mistaken her for an easy mark. Not that she’d ever actually had to pull the trigger.

Not until Bennett…

The moment Thorne had freed her wrists to tangle his fingers in her hair and better lay siege to her lips, she could have drawn and fired.

Had he treated her like the high-handed, dishonest, selfish, entitled, arrogant bastard that he was, she probably would have.

But…

His kiss had conveyed a sentiment she’d thought him incapable of.

Tenderness.

And not that disingenuous, overwrought sort a man expressed when attempting a seduction. He’d been anything but romantic, in fact. But there had been something in thedichotomy of his hard kiss and his soft embrace that had captivated her. As mesmerizing as his lips had been, the hand cupping the back of her head had been equally so. As had the other strong arm gliding up her back to cushion her from the rough trunk of the tree. He’d not merely pressed his arousal against her, as Bennett was wont to do, grinding at her like a bull anticipating a rut.

He’d seemed to… curl around her. Like a warm, muscled shelter from the bite of the winter rain. Delicious, masculine heat had permeated her garments, singed her flesh, and culminated in a pool of aroused sensation between her legs.

Damn you,she thought up at him.Damn you for making me weak.

She wanted to snipe at him. To demand he let her go. To give him a tongue-lashing he’d never forget.

Best she not think of the word “tongue” just now. She winced.

Seeming to misread the glare and the gesture, his grip on her shoulders instantly gentled, though he didn’t release her.

Had she been a worldly, witty woman she’d have said something coy and nonchalant. Something that both insulted his manhood and expressed a lack of affectation over what he’d just done to her.

What they’d just done together.

Instead, she muttered, “Your friend McGrath was right about the rabid deerhound.”

Possibly the least provocative sentence uttered by a woman whose lips still tingled and burned from the abrasion of an unbelievably erotic Highlander’s shadow beard.

God, she loathed him.

Didn’t she?

She just couldn’t yield her wits to another devastatingly handsome man with strong shoulders and a dimpled smile. Not again. Not after what happened last time.

The cold bit through the layers of her clothing more viciously now that the warmth he’d shared with her slid away like a careful thief into the storm.